Bread for the Journey. Thomas W. Currie
Читать онлайн книгу.
demonic, the deepest distortion of any religious experience. A religion of fear. Religion of pseudo-humility. Religion of guilt: They are all temptations, traps,—very strong indeed, not only in the world, but inside the church. Somehow “religious” people often look on joy with suspicion.”26
I think God will forgive everything except lack of joy; when we forget that God created the world and saved it. Joy is not one of the “components” of Christianity, it’s the tonality of Christianity that penetrates everything—faith and vision. Where there is no joy, Christianity becomes fear and therefore torture. We know about the fallen state of the world only because we know about its glorious creation and its salvation by Christ. The knowledge of the fallen world does not kill joy, which emanates from the world, always constantly, as a bright sorrow . . . . This world is having fun; nevertheless it is joyless because joy (different from what is called “fun”) can only be from God, only from on high—not only joy of salvation, but salvation as joy. To think—every Sunday we have a banquet with Christ, at His table, in His Kingdom; then we sink into our problems, into fear and suffering. God saved the world through joy: “ . . . you will have pain but your pain will turn into joy . . . .” (John 16:21 “When a woman is in travail, she has sorrow, because her hour has come; but when she is delivered of the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world.”27)
. . . for if a man would see what I call joy, or if a man would simply love Christ—just a little, would come to Him, nothing else would be needed. If not, nothing will help. All begins with a miracle, not with conversations. I feel tired of the noise and petty intrigues that surround the church, of the absence of breathing space, of silence, of rhythm, of all that is present in the Gospel. Maybe that is why I love an empty church, where the Church speaks through silence. I love it before the service and after the service. I love everything that usually seems to be ‘in between’ (to walk on a sunny morning to work, to look at a sunset, to quietly sit a while), that which may not be important, but which alone, it seems to me, is that chink through which a mysterious ray of light shines. Only in those instances do I feel alive, turned to God; only in them is there the beating of a completely ‘other’ life.”28
April 16, 2003
A month or so ago, we read Karl Barth’s Dogmatics in Outline (Harper Torchbooks, 1959), an exposition of the Apostles’ Creed. In commenting on “The third day, he rose again from the dead,” Barth writes:
If you have heard the Easter message, you can no longer run around with a tragic face and lead the humorless existence of a man who has no hope. One thing still holds, and only this one thing is really serious, that Jesus is the Victor. A seriousness that would look back past this, like Lot’s wife, is not Christian seriousness. It may be burning behind—and truly it is burning—but we have to look not at it, but at the other fact, that we are invited and summoned to take seriously the victory of God’s glory in this man Jesus and to be joyful in him. Then we may live in thankfulness and not in fear.29
So rejoice in this Easter season, not in ignorance or denial of all the world’s miseries, but in the knowledge that as miserable as all of these no doubt are, they are not capable of doing what they want to do, that is, to separate us from the love of Christ. Jesus is Victor! That is the reason to be glad and rejoice in this day
November 6, 2003
Yesterday at staff meeting I read some words from Father Schmemann, which I would like to share with you. A leader in the Orthodox Church, Father Schmemann was often called upon to settle church squabbles and debates. This entry is dated Monday, April 10, 1978, and it expresses some of Father Schmemann’s weariness with turf battles in the church. He writes:
I feel no desire to fight, only a desire to leave (to get away) as far as possible. Not out of cowardice, but out of conviction that it is impossible to even hint at what would be the goal of such a fight. To hint at the joy (of the Gospel)—mysterious, never loud; at the beauty and humility—secret, never showy; at the goodness, never extolling itself. ‘Come to me . . . .and I will give you peace.’—How can this be reconciled with a never ending, thunderous, ‘we declare, we demand . . . .’ [While] standing on Second Ave. changing a tire in the garage, I contemplated people on the street who were going home from work with shopping bags; and earlier, a mother, with two little boys, all three in poor but so obviously festive clothes, all three lit up by the setting sun. Why do I like it so much? I, the most unsentimental and indifferent man, I want to cry. Why do I know with such certitude that I am in contact with the “ultimate,” that which gives total joy and faith, the rock against which all (my little) problems crash?30
One longs for such “unsentimental” gifts amidst our own church’s squabbles.
October 27, 2004
I have been teaching a Sunday School class recently on “Sabbath as a Way of Knowing God”. In preparing for that course, I ran across these words from Karl Barth, which I would share with you:
As we all know the minister’s Sunday involves both a program and work, yet does this mean that he has to bemoan it? Is not the minister the ideal case of the man who works joyfully on the holy day and in this very way keeps it holy? If it were toilsome and dull for ministers to do their Sunday work, how could they expect the congregation and the world to find it refreshing? More generally, we may ask whether even during the week theology is a labor operosus, a burden and anxiety, something which has to be done for professional reasons but which we should be happy to lay aside with a clear conscience. If theology as such is not a joy to the theologian, if in his [or her!] theological work, he [or she] is not genuinely free from care, what is it? Can he [or she] then abandon it on Sunday and devote himself [or herself] to all sorts of tomfoolery? Why should he [or she] not be free for theology? Fundamentally, cannot the heaviest theological working day be for him [or her] the best day of rest?31
Which is why one’s time at seminary ought to be, despite the immense amount of travel, work, and weariness involved, the most joyful time of all.
November 2, 2005
This morning at staff meeting, I read this quote from Simone Weil which I would like to share with you. She writes:
Will power, the kind that, if need be, makes us set our teeth and endure suffering, is the principal weapon of the apprentice engaged in manual work. But, contrary to the usual belief, it has practically no place in study. The intelligence can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in the work. The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy. The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking, there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship will not even have a trade. It is the part played by joy in our studies that makes of them a preparation for the spiritual life, for desire directed toward God is the only power capable of raising the soul. Or rather, it is God alone who comes down and possesses the soul, but desire alone draws God down . . . 32
“The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.” So may we run (and breathe and study) with such joy.
February 8, 2006
In his introduction to Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir, Hope Against Hope, Clarence Brown writes of Mandelstam’s husband, Osip, that he was not only one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century, but also a poet who, despite years spent in exile ending in death in one of Stalin’s gulags, sought to account for the joy he espied at the heart of life. In the introduction, Brown refers to a fragment of one of Mandelstam’s early essays in which he writes of this inexpungeable joy, concluding finally that